Friday, December 27, 2013

When I heard Brian Tyler was replacing Lorne Balfe as Assassin's Creed composer, my heart soared, given that I love his recent work on Fast and Furious 6 and on Now You See Me. He didn't disappoint. This is an awesome soundtrack, though he didn't keep Kyd's "first civilization" sound even for the modern stuff like Balfe did, but that's an okay tradeoff.
I got the game for Christmas and holy cow, just the sheer volume of content is making me head spin. This is a great game, and seems to have completely sidestepped the issues Assassin's Creed 3 had. That's what I've been doing for the past two days. Yesterday I did nothing by play Black Flag. I'm surprised and overjoyed by it.

This is my biggest and favorite essay of the three I've been posting, mostly because it directly pertains to things I've already shown interest in. Let's give some backstory real quick:
I was not technically in the Vikings class I attended or wrote those other essays for. I was actually in HIST493, which is a History Independent Study course, essentially allowing me to take the Vikings class as an upper-division course if I did some extra work. This essay is the extra work. I have taken multiple other classes with this professor, and something we've talked about a few times is games and their potential within teaching - we've especially talked about Assassin's Creed. As this Viking class had us reading Njal's Saga, I thought it would be good to show him Sagas of the Icelanders (the game), and he thought it was interesting. So we decided I could do my extra paper on RPGs. I was originally also going to talk about video games, but, uh, that's gonna have to wait, because both time constraints and also the fact that the essay is already giant stopped me.

Now, this was written for people with no experience with RPGs or their terminology. I occasionally lapse out of the formal style for writing history papers, and lack footnotes (though I have a brief bibliography containing the three games I discuss). The three games are Sagas of the Icelanders (which I have both played and run once each), Montsegur 12444 (which I have played once), and Dog Eat Dog (which I have not played).

Basically, I'm really interested in discussing this further. I know we have a number of teachers in the RPG community, but most stuff I've seen such as Ruthless Diastema podcast tends to hit at a primary school level which is important but also a very different context from university. I'm also interested in seeing if others agree with what I'm saying about these games.

My professor and I have been talking about taking this further, essentially co-authoring a more complete paper on the subject of games and the instruction of history (probably, he says, through mocking up an imaginary course syllabus for the subject). Ideas?

Anyway, here's the disclaimer and the paper.

As usual, this is my essay, made available so I can potentially
receive feedback and to help others learn what I'm learning myself. I'm
no expert, so seriously, none of the would-be paper thieves out there
should use or even cite this. Still, I think I learned a lot to be able
to write the essay, and hopefully you learn something too!
And if you know something about the subject, let me know if I got
something right/wrong, or if you have interesting insights or thoughts
about it! Same with folks who know things about writing essays! And I do
love hearing when just other regular folks get some education out of my
work.

Max / EgoVikings Independent
Study Individual Essay

Cultures, Experiences,
and Human Connections: The Benefits of Analog Tabletop Roleplaying Games to the
Teaching of History

For many, games are an important part of everyday modern
life. These games take many forms. Sports, specialized media forms like video
games, commonly-hold social board games, games of chance like the Lottery or
the myriad card and dice games played at casinos, and even many everyday tasks
not conventionally considered games are being game-ified, adopting elements
like points and competition. The simple reason behind this is that games are
fun! People like playing games, but often like games even more if they can get
something out of it. For this reason, game designers are always looking for
ways to reward the player.

The oldest games we have available to us were created
completely in the abstract. Tic-tac-toe, Go, and Checkers are all exchanges in
simple game terms rather than representations of anything. This tradition of game
design is still visible in many board games, and in the lottery and card games.
From these, the rewards that can be provided are limited in nature: improved
skill and strategic thinking, and money (in the form of betting within card
games or the lottery). Little else can be achieved with these basic games. The
next level of games is ones that are metaphors for some other activity but
still function completely without reference to these activities. Sports are
ritualized combat, and Monopoly is a game about being a real estate tycoon, but
take those elements away and they remain sturdy, playable games. In these you
get the same benefits as from abstract games (skill, betting money) but also
gain a greater understanding of the concept being symbolized by the game,
albeit only at a conceptual level. The third level of games build on the idea
of a game as a represntation of something else and makes it fundamental to
playing the game itself, where removing that representation changes the nature
of the game itself. The most common form of game in this category is the
role-playing game. Both pen-and-paper roleplaying games (henceforth referred to
as RPGs) and digital video games rely on the concept of playing a game where
one’s character is different from themselves or where the setting is different
from our own, or both. These types of game have unique applications in
augmenting or enhancing the teaching of history. Games are excellent tools for
teaching specific elements of history, though caution must be exercised to
understand when liberties are taken to achieve the game’s other agendas. For
these purposes I will be looking at several major historical fiction RPGs to
analyze their value to history education, predominantly focusing on Sagas of
the Icelanders, Montsegur 1244, and Dog Eat Dog.

First, a quick explanation of how pen-and-paper RPGs
(also called tabletop RPGs) function is warranted, given their relatively small
imprint in popular culture. Now, explaining these games as a whole is akin to
trying to explain all sports with one description – difficult, full of
exceptions, and largely unhelpful when going beyond the basics. However, a
unified factor of almost all RPGs is that they are social games. To play, you
gather together a small group of friends (usually 3 to 5 people), along with
the rulebook to the game and whatever else the game requires (oftentimes dice,
sometimes six-sided and sometimes a bit more exotic). Players then use the
rules to facilitate a conversation between them, exploring the actions of their
characters, the consequences of those actons, and ultimately creating an
original story. In this way, playing an RPG is a lot like a collaborative
storytelling session or improvisational acting, but facilitated by a set of
rules adding uncertainty, drama, and surprise to the story. The important thing
to know is that the game is an interaction between a group of friends and the
designer via the rules, but with the friends taking the active role in the
game.

The first RPG to discuss is called Sagas of the
Icelanders, by Sloveian game designer Gregor Vuga. Self-described as a game
about “the trials, tribulations, and adventures of the first settlers of
Iceland, as described in the Icelandic Sagas,” the game strives to “paint a
believable picture of saga-period Iceland,” though the author quickly
highlights that he uses “the word ‘believable’ and not ‘realistic’ or
‘accurate,’” with the goal being to “create fiction in the historical cotext,
not recreate it.” This is the assumption one must make with this social game,
where the group of people playing cannot be expected to be experts in the field
(otherwise the game would pertain only to RPG players who are Sagas-period
experts, which is a niche audience indeed). In order to allow even completely
unknowledgable players to create that “believable picture,” the designer of the
game had to build the game’s rules to do the heavy lifting.

Now, in order to accommodate players who are not all are
experts or who lack even one person versed in the historical truth, the game
cannot take out a large chunk of time to explain the way things were, and the
rules cannot model every single facet of the Sagas. Instead, the game has to
distill out what the author considers to be the important elements of the Sagas
to model within the game. This is one benefit of using an RPG as an initial
learning tool – the elements pulled out of history to create the game can
provide a strong picture of what is unique, special, or different about that
part of history. In Sagas of the Icelanders, the game singles out one major
theme to flavor the entire experience of the game: gender politics. The game
goes to extensive lengths to represent the divide in gender roles iconic of the
Vikings, especially where those roles are furthest from our own societal
understanding of gender roles. That representation of the gender gap will be
apparent in many elements of the game, but especially in the Rolebooks, Stats,
and Moves.

In Sagas of the Icelanders, all but one participant play
one character, who is theirs to control and make decisions about (the remaining
participant is the Master of Ceremonies, who is in charge of playing all the
remaining characters and putting obstacles in the players’ paths to make
struggles real and rewarding). The first thing a player does is create a
character, and “the first thing you do when creating a character should be
choosing their gender.” Gender is literally the first step of playing the game,
and forms the core around which your character is built. After choosing male or
female (other understandings of gender didn’t exist in the Sagas, and thus don’t
in the game), you choose a Rolebook. Rolebooks are sort of like lists of
options with instructions on how many to choose from each list, determining
elements such as a character’s look, abilities, and relationships based upon
which rolebook was chosen. There are four female rolebooks, “the matriarch, the
sei[th]kona, the shield-maiden and the woman,” four male rolebooks, “the
go[th]i, the huscarl, the man and the wanderer,” as well as three which could
be of either gender, “the child, the monster and the thrall.”[1]
This division alone is one of the first ways in which Sagas of the Icelanders
pulls out what the important, or at least significant, social roles were for
each gender in the Sagas. Looking more specifically at each of the rolebooks,
it teaches what it means to be a man, or a go[th]i, or a matriarch in the
Sagas. It’s fitting that almost all characters from Njal’s Saga (referenced in
the text as The Saga of Burnt Njall – the text occasionally provides quotes
from the Sagas to reinforce how the Sagas were or to help evoke the intended
mood for the game) can be thought of in terms like these. Gunnar would be a
Man, Bergthora a Woman, Skarphedin a Huscarl, Hoskuld Thrainsson a Go[th]i, old
Gunnhild a Sei[th]kona. This division of rolebooks has a couple effects. First,
it does a good job of breaking down the categories that characters fall into,
even if they don’t have that title in the original Saga. Njal, for example, is
best modeled as a Go[th]i, based on his legal mastery and influence and his
less-than-manly appearance by the cultural standards. By dividing the rolebooks
without hierarchy however, the importance of some may be overstated. While the
game calls out that “The Man and The Woman should take precedence before the
other rolebooks,” the Shield-maiden is positioned to be just as common in games
as the Go[th]i or Huscarl, which isn’t true in my experience of the Sagas
(primarily Njal’s Saga) though a cursory glance at the internet informs me that
they may have played a larger part in other sagas such as the Saga of the
Volsungs, which while it would reinforce the strength of the list of rolebooks
doesn’t change the fact that it is otherwise without prioritization of various
roles an inaccurate picture of the Sagas may form. Ultimately this is only a
small problem, as the Sagas themselves differed greatly in the demographics of
featured characters. The list also precludes the idea of crossing the gender line; for example Svan, a magic-wielding man
from Njal’s Saga, would be a male
Sei[th]kona, which is outside of the scope of the game. This distinction is a
double-edged sword. On one hand, it fails to reveal that element of society to
new players. On the other hand, through the Sagas those who totally violate
those gender barriers are portrayed as villains (Svan for magic, Mord for
treachery and dishonorableness, Hallgerd for boldness and refusal to be
subservient), and as the players’ characters are protagonists it would be
inappropriate for them to be crossing such boundaries.

If the rolebooks determine what sort of person a
character is in a general sense, then the Stats exist to define the character’s
personality as an individual. Put simply, Stats are an attribute of a character
that range from -1 to +2, with higher values meaning that a character has more
of that aspect in their personality. The four personality attributes that Sagas
care about are “Young, Versed, Gendered, and Wyrd.” Young means fierce, strong,
hot-headed, and the like, Versed implies experience and training, Gendered is
about how well a character plays into their gender role (with a negative value
not representing crossing over boundaries so much as simple ineptitude at
things they are expected to do as a man or woman), and Wyrd marking the lucky,
odd, or set apart. These four things have historical context and teaching
behind them as well: they’re a simplification of the lines along which people
were judged in the sagas: energy and enthusiasm, skill, (wo)manliness, and
ordinariness. To take a couple of characters from Njal’s Saga and judge them by
this system, Njal could be interpreted as +0 Young, +1 Versed,+0 Gendered, +1 Wyrd, which, fittingly
enough, is a stat line available to the Go[th]i, determined above to be the
best rolebook for Njal. Gunnar could be +2 Young, +0 Versed, +1 Gendered,-1 Wyrd, which is available to the Man
rolebook picked for him earlier. The stats show a fairly good picture of the
various important elements to characters in the Sagas, but are again limited by
the fact that they are definitely a simplification of the truth in order to
prevent confusion by the players.

The third main element by which the game makes clear to
its players what it means to be in 10th Century Iceland is the
moves. Moves are a game term for the dice rolls in the game. Each move has a
‘trigger,’ indicating when you should roll the dice. When a player, in the
course of the conversation of play, says that their character does something
and the action aligns with a move’s trigger, you follow the instructions in the
rules, rolling dice and then interpreting the results. While what happens as a
result of specific moves is
revealing, and that will be dealt with soon, the most important part to look at
when analyzing the game’s value as a teacher of history is actually in the
triggers. This is because the moves and their dice rolls are the heart of the
game – they signify what actions are important in the game, and reward players
who do them by making the game surprising and unexpected. They are the only
time when the rules and the conversation of play and the rules of the game
interact for players. Now, the list could theoretically be comprehensive,
accounting for any action that might fail, but Sagas of the Icelanders instead
opts to only provide moves that reinforce the feeling of playing out your own
Saga. Here are some examples of moves that anyone can trigger: “When you endure
grave harm,” “When you give someone a gift,” and “When your character survives
a winter in Iceland.” These are actions that define scenes in the Sagas, and
thus they are the actions chosen to define the game. However, beyond the common
moves that can be triggered by any player, there is also a category of moves
specific to each gender. The selection of these moves, even moreso than the
rolebooks, define the different ways the genders act. Some of those female
moves include “When you entice a man,” “When you raise your voice and talk
sense,” and “When you goad a man to action,” all things definitely done by
characters in the Sagas that are iconic of woman and inappropriate for men to
do. On the flipside, some male moves triggers are “When you throw an insult at
another man,” “When you honor is in question,” and “When you accept a physical
challenge,” which are similarly defining of mens’ actions in the Sagas. The
trouble here is the same as with rolebooks and stats, that they are a
simplification to make play easy at the cost of historical comprehensiveness and
that they deny the ability to violate the gender barrier.

On the topic of moves, an extra part should be addressed:
the additional moves in the back section of the book. Depending on what sort of
game of Sagas of the Icelanders you’re playing, groups might bring in special
sets of moves that represent elements of Icelandic society that are not
necessarily important to all games of Sagas (and thus are relegated to the back
to increase the accessibility of the main game). These refer to specific parts
of society; for example, there is a section on religion (with extra moves like
“When you accept the gospel of the White Christ” and “When you die a pagan”),
on warfare and violence (with “When you fight with many against many” and “When
you endure great harm during a holmganga duel” as a couple example moves), and
on law at the Quarter Courts at the Althing (with move triggers like “When you
rule against your Go[th]i or a member of your family” and “When you speak the
law before the assembled host”). In this way, games might address topics
important to the Sagas in a more rules-mediated (and thus more structured) way,
allowing for the game to not only be more suited to what the players are
interested in exploring (maybe a group doesn’t care so much about religion but
really likes playing out legal stuff), but also allows the game to be focused
to provide a better, more accurate feel for certain aspects of Icelandic
society in the Sagas period. Even further attention could be payed to moves,
such as the implications each specific move has for bringing forth a
genre-appropriate tone (such as how the male move “When you accept a physical
challenge” always promotes very fast and dangerous combat rather than
protracted fights), but for now it is best to shift to a different game to look
at.

For the next two games, discussion will be kept
relatively brief, focusing on the ways they differ from Sagas of the Icelanders
in style of providing a historical lens, as Sagas of the Icelanders is
generally a good model of how games model history, with simplification and
categorization to improve accessibility (though Sagas has an exceptional degree
of historical implications and significance baked into its rules compared to
the majority of games). In Montsegur 1244 by Frederik J. Jensen, there is no
Master of Ceremonies or other controlling figure as there is in Sagas of the
Icelanders. Montsegur is a game about the last stand of the Cathars at
Montsegur during the Albigensian Crusade. This historical event ended in forced
conversion or burning at the stake for nearly every soul inside the
nigh-impregnable mountain fortress of Montsegur in the south of France. Every
player of the game controls two characters, selected from a batch of characters
that come from the game with pre-existing roles within the small village inside
the fortress’ walls, such as the unbelieving ruler, the leader of the guard,
the head Perfect (a role in the Cathar theology similar to a priest) or a
harlot in the town. They play these characters, each of which comes with their
own batch of personal issues, and their interactions through a number of scenes
structured by the game itself, starting with a “practice” scene of the
assassination of a Catholic inquisitor that leads to the main scenes, which
take place in several acts about the very beginning of the siege through the
very end and the fate of the characters in the aftermath of the fall of the
fortress. Scenes are played out in a structured way that makes the tension and
complicated-ness of the situation and the all-encompassing fear of God all
become apparent in the characters. This is the biggest strength of this game:
it takes players from modern societies and places them in the shoes of a group
of splinter group of Christianity who no longer exist today and practiced some
extremely odd beliefes, the bulk of which are explained to the players as they
become important according to the act structure. This group, very often poorly
understood thanks to being wiped out by a war-like Catholic Church (the same
Pope earlier declared the Fourth Crusade) and being branded as heretics, are
difficult for many modern people to understand. This game puts people in those
times with Cathar beliefs and allows them to explore the chaos of an almost
alien theology. It also provides a substantial experience of what it felt like
to be alone and crumbling under the furious weight of a crusading Church, a
less-explored perspective for most players. In this way, the game is an
exceptional tool for taking on the role of an otherwise difficult-to-comprehend
culture, adding weight and even an air of personal experience to learning the
topics in a more traditional sense.

The third, and last, game being fully explored here is
Dog Eat Dog, by Liam Liwanag Burke, which is self-described as “a game of
imperialism and assimilation on the Pacific Islands.” Dog Eat Dog is not a tale
of any particular island or assimilation in the way that Montsegur 1244 is the
story of the Cathars at Montsegur. Instead, Dog Eat Dog is about theme and
process. The players first describe the Natives of this island and their
society, putting in a little information to guide the culture; this is not a
real culture but a theoretical one. The players then each get to add a piece of
detail about the colonizers, the Occupation. The players also will have Rules,
which are unspoken assumptions governing the interaction of the players, and at
the beginning of the game, there is only one, this one: “The (Native People)
are inferior to the (Occupation people).” One player, always the richest player
in the real world, plays the Occupation. All the others play a native, and
detail themselves a bit. The course of the game involves playing out scenes of
the characters’ responses to the Occupation’s arrival, with conflicts causing tokens
to be passed around until the Occupation player has no tokens or the Native
players are all out. At the end, if the Occupation is out, they describe why
they grant the natives local autonomy. If a Native has a lot of tokens, they
describe how they assimilated. If a Native has no tokens but is still alive,
they must suddenly be shockingly violent and destructive, then die. The game is
stilted at every turn against the Natives; even if the Natives won, the
Occupation grants them autonomy,
rather than the Natives earning it. This experience is a shocking one overall,
but what does it have to do with history? In short, it’s representational of
the mass colonization of the Pacific during the mid-1800s. The game provides an
experience that still causes discomfort to many, opening eyes to the other side
and placing gravity on the teaching of history by making it feel human. And
even outside of the context of the Pacific, it can apply to any colonized
peoples (the game even calls out that the Teutonic Knights’ ‘spreading’ of
religion to Eastern Europe as a potential alternate setting).

These are three very different takes on how an RPG can
teach history. In one, Saga of the Icelanders, a culture is built in heavily
into the rules. You may not play a story of law or religion or blood feuds, but
you most certainly will play Icelanders in the Viking Age. In another, Dog Eat
Dog, culture is up to the players, but the way the story will go follows a few
very distinct and organized paths. Either the Occupation will stop bothering to
oppress the Natives, or the Natives will be assimilated or killed, but the game
could take place on any fictional island or theoretical colonization. In the
third, Montsegur 1244, both culture and story are hard-coded into the rules,
making the end a forgone conclusion (the fortress will fall) and the experience about the human reactions in the process
of a doomed scenario. And those are things they teach: a culture, a lesson, and
a human experience. All of them have a common benefit of putting the players
personally at stake and making them care. An additional bonus is that the games
are often fun! And fun things are much easier to convince people to do, even if
they don’t usually like history, making them either an excellent gateway into
further interest in the subject or a simple way to deliver information to those
it wouldn’t reach.

But before wrapping up, there needs to be a few notes on
the problems inherent to RPGs as teaching tools. A major problem is that they
all come with a substantial amount of straight material to just deliver and
read. Dog Eat Dog doesn’t really require the setting to get the experience, and
Sagas of the Icelanders builds it mostly into the rules themselves, but all
require a bit of a debrief at the beginning to explain what’s going on. That’s
really just a symptom of a much larger problem, and that’s that the game is
mostly limited by what the player knows. In my own games of Sagas of the
Icelanders, I’ve brought in some extra things that I’ve learned to spice up the
experience more, but that most people wouldn’t know (for example, the value
placed on naming weapons in Scandinavian culture). People can come up with all
sorts of things, but they’re limited by what they know. Often they’ll bring in
ideas they’ve read (I had a player bring in himself as a Christian missionary
from Norway after looking up Iceland on his phone before the game and seeing
Olaf Tryggvason), but the unfortunate truth is that these games can easily
reinforce misunderstandings of how things were. This is what the game’s design
is there for, to make the truth matter to the way it’s played, but without an
expert it is ultimately a fun, collaborative way to share your own knowledge
with your friends, rather than gleaning brand new truths. Again, the game’s
rules mitigate this: it doesn’t matter if you didn’t know about it before hand,
playing Sagas of the Icelanders ensures that you will come away understanding
something about the gender divide in Sagas-period Iceland.

In the specific context of a history class, there are
benefits and issues. The presence of an expert is unimaginably helpful, for all
the reasons above. Of the learning objectives for the Pacific Lutheran
University history department, the final two are present and exceptionally
well-achieved by the games, those goals being to “develop the ability to
determine…the magnitude and significance of historical changes that take place
within a society or culture” (which is most certainly a facet of Dog Eat Dog and
Montsegur 1244) and to “develop the capacity to recognize diversity,
complexity, and the moral dilemmas inherent in the study of history.” Unfortunately,
they are bound by two unconquerable elements: player count and time. Each game
has a specific range of players it can accommodate, almost always between three
and six, and they also take between three and five hours to play a session,
ruling them out of an ordinary class structure. However, they might make an
excellent side activity for interested parties looking to gain a deeper
understanding of a subject. Overall, RPGs form a complex picture of how games
can aid in the instruction of history. They can teach the particular elements
they were designed around very well, but break down when taken outside of that
very specific intention or if interest goes much deeper than a surface
understanding of what is being taught, and are bound by inherent structural
limitations on participation and time. They differ significantly from video
games in many ways, primarily the designer’s role in teaching, the singular
experience (as opposed to a social experience), and the audiovisual component
not present in the predominantly oral RPGs. Despite their complications, games
are a growing part of our culture and the scholastic applications of these
games to the teaching of history cannot be ignored, and this examination of
Sagas of the Icelanders, Montsegur 1244, and Dog Eat Dog only scratches the
surface of the realm of games with relevance to history.

[1]
Where the character Eth was present it was replaced with [th] because I don’t
know how to type the original character, which is used in the original text.
This replacement will persist throughout the essay.

Tuesday, December 24, 2013

Well, I'm still listening to Tessellate (this week's Sunday Songs post) a lot, but here's something a bit different. Live trumpet over EDM isn't what I thought I'd hear a couple days ago. But I like it! It's novel and intriguing. It's pulsing with energy and yet gives its most unique component, the trumpet, center stage over the electronica. And while the trumpet's lines would probably start to get stale on their own, the lightly shifting beat keeps it fresh. I want to hear more of this guy!

Well damn if the title isn't super long, but this is the second essay I have. With a required length of 2500 words, I hit about 2639 words.

So this was for my class on Martin Luther. Each class member chose a topic that Luther discussed and researched it independently and then gave a presentation and wrote a full paper on it. I picked Luther's argument with Zwingli about Identical Predication and Real Presence in the Eucharist. This is a pretty heady religion subject, but as an academic class there should be nothing really inflammatory here on my part. My main document was Luther's "Confession Concerning Christ's Supper," which was a direct response to Zwingli over a subject previously discussed in his work "This Is My Body." There is also modern scholarship cited. One of the citations of a Dr. Torvend is actually of a speech he gave at a Lutheran conference this year which is not available online - I only have it because Torvend was my professor.

There isn't really a set prompt here. We were presenting findings on a subject Luther wrote on, with support from scholarly sources. Other than that we were pretty free.

As usual, this is my essay, made available so I can potentially
receive feedback and to help others learn what I'm learning myself. I'm
no expert, so seriously, none of the would-be paper thieves out there
should use or even cite this. Still, I think I learned a lot to be able
to write the essay, and hopefully you learn something too!
And if you know something about the subject, let me know if I got
something right/wrong, or if you have interesting insights or thoughts
about it! Same with folks who know things about writing essays! And I do
love hearing when just other regular folks get some education out of my
work.
As an added note, since this is a religion thing that's actually probably practiced by some of you folks, I'm interested in discourse about this stuff, but I'd rather not get into any arguments over Luther's actual position and its right-ness; I'm nonreligious after all, I'm not on any side trying to convince.

Max / EgoWord Count: 2639

Bread
and Wine, Body and Blood: Luther and Zwingli’s Debate

Over
the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist

In the 16th Century, the
winds of change were blowing through Europe and the Catholic Church. It was not
the first time the Church was undergoing changes and challenges to its
supremacy, such as in the 13th Century with heretical sects like the
Cathars or the Oxford Realists in the 14th Century[1],
but unlike the previous reform movements and reinterpretations of Church
doctrine, events leading to the 16th Century created the perfect
environment for reform. The existing interpretations of Christ’s role in an
individual’s life made it easy for the populace to interpret the Black Death, still
felt across Europe despite 100 years having passed, as the wrath of God. Church
corruption was more rampant than ever, with the Papacy’s vast riches ever more
obvious to the common folk. The Great Schism was fresh in the minds of many,
weakening peoples’ resolve in the complete authority of the pope and the
question of who to owe loyalty to was made all the more complicated by the rise
of secular kings and other leaders. This climate of discontent was punctuated
by the sale of indulgences, Church-sponsored certificates that pardoned sins
for a monetary cost. Indulgences widened the gap between the rich and the poor,
with the Church coming out on top.

Amidst all of the silent discontent, one
monk’s dissatisfaction with his own state of salvation was reaching a breaking
point. This monk was Martin Luther, a scholastically-trained Augustinian monk
in Wittenberg, Germany. After realizing an alternative lens (justification by
grace or faith) through which to view salvation, Luther began to write papers
questioning the methods of the Church and their basis in the Bible, ultimately
being declared a heretic. Unlike all the other heretics that attempted reform
in the past, this time Europe was ready for a change, and Luther built a
substantial number of supporters. However, Luther had to contend with something
he hadn’t expected: competition from other reformers building off of his ideas.
The most important early competitor was Huldrych Zwingli, a Swiss reformer who
agreed on many points with Luther but differed on a single critical point: the
Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist and whether the principle of Identical
Predication was applicable to the sacrament. Martin Luther was a stalwart
opponent of Identical Predication with regard to the spiritual and a supporter
of the Real Presence in the Eucharist, and in Luther’s Confession Concerning Christ’s Supper he directly dismantles the
proposals of his opponents both theologically and grammatically.

One can’t fully understand the gravity
of this conflict without understanding the rest of Luther’s and Zwingli’s
theology, at least in a basic sense. Both Zwingli and Luther argue that the
Word of God (primarily through Scripture) is the ultimate authority on matters
of the spirit and that the Church had diverged radically from it. Both had
histories in humanist scholasticism, and both were ordained by the Church. Both
believed in justification by grace, rather than works as was believed by the
Church, meaning that no external works (beyond Baptism) needed to be done in
order to be saved to heaven.This point
formed the core of Luther’s theology, and from it he extrapolated many, many
novel ideas about the meaning of Scripture, covering every topic from baptism
to wealth. On the other hand, Zwingli’s writings were quite focused, revolving
around a different concept: complete fidelity to the Scriptures, and only to what is directly prescribed in
Scripture. If something was not commanded in Scripture, it was not meant to be
a part of religious life. Luther was more conservative, only ruling out
practices directly forbidden by Scripture, while allowing others to continue.
Zwingli also considered many elements of the Bible to be purely symbolic,
rather than rituals that were truly reoccurring in the Church.

Turning away from overall theology
to the specific issue at hand, the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist was
the single issue that kept Zwingli and Luther from ever coming to any solid
agreement. The idea of Real Presence is that, during the service of the mass,
the priest re-enacts Christ’s presentation of the bread and wine, saying “This
is my body,” and “This is my blood,” and, through those re-enactments the bread
and wine are filled with the presence of Christ and eaten to gain unity with
Christ. The confusion comes from the process of Christ’s presence filling the
bread and wine, with the problem stemming from two concepts: the location of
Christ and the idea of Identical Predication. For the former, Zwingli believed
that Christ could not be bodily present in two places at once. Referring to the
Creed’s declaration that Christ “is seated at the right hand of the Father,”
Zwingli argued that he could not also be bodily present in the bread and wine
of the Eucharist. Luther argued in return that God is omnipresent, present in,
with, and under all things, and thus his right hand is also present in all
things, including the bread and wine. Since the individual pieces of his
argument, that God is omnipresent and that Jesus is at the right hand of God,
were taken directly and explicitly from Scripture, Luther left his argument for
the ubiquity of Christ to speak for itself, turning next to the difficulties
posed by Identical Predication.[2]

Put simply, Identical Predication is a
philosophical concept that two things of diverse natures cannot at once be one
thing; a tree is not a rock, a chair is not a door, and so on. If two things
cannot at once be one thing, then it would seem illogical that bread can also
be the body of Christ, or that wine can also be the blood of Christ. Zwingli,
seeing this, believed that there is no Real Presence in the bread or wine and
the meal is purely symbolic and memorial of the Last Supper. The Catholics,
faced with Identical Predication and a need for the Real Presence, proclaimed
the doctrine of transubstantiation, that when the body of Christ fills the
bread, the bread’s essence is annihilated, left only in form (or “accident”),
with the essence being entirely that of Christ. Thus, the bread is bread, then
it is the body of Christ, but is never essentially both, avoiding the issue of
Identical Predication. Luther is different in that he simply denied that
Identical Predication was an issue for the Eucharist, and that the bread does
indeed also become the body of Christ. Explaining how this could be possible
was the largest part of Luther’s Confession
Concerning Christ’s Supper, his open response to his opponents. Given that
transubstantiation is significantly closer to Luther’s ideas than Zwingli’s
symbolic Eucharist was, Luther found himself much more aligned with the Papacy
than with his own fellow reformers.

Luther’s argument takes several
forms in his Confession and other
works. One major point that Luther returns to repeatedly is how Zwingli’s
unconventional interpretation leads to deeply problematic theological
implications. More than any other point, this issue bothered Luther personally,
and it was on this basis that he refers to Zwingli as a fanatic and a
blasphemer. Luther was not only disapproving of the notions proposed by
Zwingli, he considered them to be deeply and personally offensive. This wasn’t
helped by Zwingli’s tone in his letters to Luther, where he came off as
scolding and condescending, and while Zwingli believed reconciliation between
them would be possible, sharp language and pointed jabs stood between them.[3] One
passage that the argument hinges upon was John 6:63, which contains the phrase
“It is the spirit that gives life, the flesh is of no avail.”[4]
The exact meaning of what is meant by flesh and spirit is the main point of
contention between the two. Zwingli considered flesh to be the physical, with
spiritual being the divine and those matters pertaining to God. Because “flesh
is to no avail,” Zwingli understood that the embodiment of Christ in the bread
and wine during the Eucharist “would not be sacramentally efficacious,”[5]
and thus dismissed the importance of the Mass as a metaphorical ceremony rather
than a literal one. Luther’s retort was that flesh in the Scripture does not
refer to all physical things, but to humanity’s sinful nature. The spiritual is
“all that comes from the Spirit or is used by the Spirit for spiritual
purposes,”[6]
which can include physical things. Luther continues that “Spirit consists in
the use, not in the object.”[7]
Luther is especially adamant because he cannot bear the implications brought by
Zwingli’s ideas. He warns that denigrating Christ’s flesh devalues the entirety
of Christianity. His argument was that if Christ’s flesh is of no avail, then
“it can be of no avail on the cross or in heaven either!”[8]

Luther discredited Zwingli by equating
his single proposal with disbelief of everything Christianity stood for, but
that wasn’t enough for Luther. Turning to the law of Identical Predication
specifically, he reached out to Scripture to prove that the Word does not
contradict that law of identical predication. He does so rather resentfully,
explaining first that it should not even be necessary, as humans must confess
that they can “not comprehend his words and works,” and so should be content
with taking them at face value.[9]
But given that that argument would likely not convince Zwingli, he brings up
examples such as Psalm 104 reading “He makes his angels winds and his ministers
flames of fire,”[10]
lumping multiple natures into one being. While this alone would refute Zwingli,
he takes special care to also refute the Church and its doctrine of
transubstantiation, noting that the angels remained complete, in substance and
in accident, even after becoming wind.[11]
He also makes reference to the Holy Spirit descending as a dove in John 1, and
writes that where one nature is mentioned, it is sometimes referred to as the
other nature, establishing that one thing is still a complete representative of
both natures.[12]
This is because to Luther, the two elements, while they can be referenced
separately, have become a single new
nature. He provides examples of when multiple natures are referred to as a
single nature in common speech, such as “if I point to or hand over a bag or
purse and say, ‘This is a hundred gulden,’ both the gesture and the word ‘this’
refer to the purse.”[13] Statements
like these are made every day by all people, because when multiple natures are
combined they form a new nature comprised of both component natures; the purse
and the gulden are still purse and gulden, but are also now a purse full of
gulden. In this way he denies that identical predication is no obstacle to the
embodiment of Christ in the Eucharist, because when the priest performs the
sacrament “it is no longer ordinary bread in the oven, but a ‘flesh-bread’ or
‘body-bread.’”[14]
In this defense, his theology regarding the Trinity becomes obvious – there is
no contradiction in having three separate natures (Father, Son, and Spirit) all
be one God, as they are three separate facets of a single united nature known
as God. Thus it can be true that one God can be three natures and still be one
God. Following this pattern of thought, Luther was unswayingly devout in his
belief in God’s nature as “a Trinity of divine persons whose works
are…indivisible,” arguing fidelity to the doctrine of the Trinity that the
Church had been practicing for centuries.[15]

At this point Luther had made it
abundantly clear that, theologically, no obstacles existed to Real Presence in
the Eucharist. However, his argument was not complete as he turned to proving
that even the idea that there is no Real Presence is irreconcilable with
Scripture. Specifically, he focuses on the unambiguity of Christ’s saying
“Take, eat; this is my body” and “Drink of it, all of you; for this is my blood
of the new testament, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins,”[16]
and the variations of those phrases that appear in the gospels of Mark and
Luke. Over the course of his Confession,
Luther examines many permutations of the phrase, how those permutations could
be construed as supporting his opponents’ views, and then breaking down why it
is unacceptable to interpret the gospels to say that. Such permutations he
denied included “Take, eat, in the bread is my body” and “With the bread is my
body” and “Under the bread is my body,”[17]
all of which are simply evasions of dealing with the Law of Identical
Predication which would make the representational concept of Scripture valid,
but are all different from what is really written. Luther attacks Zwingli and
his followers when he declares that even if “God himself gave them their choice
of a text, they would never fix on one as simple as this, yet they would always
be finding more holes and gaps in it than they find in this one.”[18]

Through his extensive and scholarly
denial of any Scriptural reading of the Eucharist and his explanation of the
problematic consequences that come with the beliefs carried by both the Church
and by other reformers, Luther attempted to establish that no other theology
could be correct. While debate continued, his words had a powerful effect, and
the Confession Concerning Christ’s Supper
is known as one of his most complete defenses of his treatment of the Eucharist
in his new tradition. He re-examined the long-held philosophical Law of
Identical Predication and tore down its relevance to Scripture, allowing his argument
for consubstantiation and the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist and
reinforcing the doctrine of the Trinity. Future theologians would debate and
augment his arguments, as John Calvin did when he adopted “the middle ground
between Luther and Zwingli,” arguing that Luther was being too conservative
while denying Zwingli as devaluing the Word of God.[19]
The debate over real presence continues today with theologians such as John
Macquarrie or J. de Baciocchi[20],
Luther’s position on the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist remains
important for its historical opening of a dialogue regarding the sacrament and
as a scholarly argument that provides the vital underpinnings of many of the
theologies that grew out of the Reformation.